Product data retention policies

Metric data

Metric data includes all time-series metric data reported by your applications, hosts, and plugins. This includes the data you see in almost all of New Relic APM, Mobile, Browser, and Plugins charts and reports.

All metric data is aggregated, but New Relic deals with fresh data and old data in different ways.

Fresh data has specific policies applied to the data to keep granular views of performance as aggregate metrics.

As data ages and becomes less useful in a granular state, New Relic summarizes that data and only keeps key metrics.

Aggregate metric data

Aggregate metric data summarizes calls to specific methods in your application: how many times each one was called and response times. In the New Relic UI, you see the class and method names along with their aggregate numbers. Metric data aggregation depends on your subscription level.

Enterprise: Aggregates (averages) to 1-hour periods after 8 days. After 90 days the data further aggregates to daily values. This means you cannot obtain data granularity of less than 1 hour after 8 days, or less than daily values after 90 days.

Pro: After 8 days

Essentials: After 3 days

Legacy Small Business, Startup, and Standard: After 3 days

Lite: After 2 hours

New Relic retains your most recent data in one-minute increments. New Relic also aggregates permanent metric data to day-size increments after 90 days. When looking at older data in small time windows, you may notice that charts show less detail. As data ages, it is aggregated into larger segments.

Key metrics

New Relic retains certain key application metrics forever for Enterprise and Pro customers, for any number of applications. New Relic aggregates permanent key metric data to day-size increments after 90 days.

*JavaScript errors in the stack trace UI are saved as trace data. JS errors are also saved as default Insights events.

Insights events

New Relic Insights pulls different types of data components: default events, custom events, and events that are bundled with other New Relic products.

Default Insights events

Based on your subscription, your New Relic products may report data to Insights as part of that subscription. Here is data retention info for Insights data that originates from other New Relic products:

You can store custom events by inserting them via the Insights Insert API. Custom events appear in Insights as a new event type.

The following subscriptions receive one day's worth of custom event data retention along with their product subscription.

APM Pro and APM Enterprise

Browser Pro

Mobile Enterprise

To extend the data retention period for your custom event data, you need a New Relic Insights Pro subscription. For more information or a Pro trial account, contact your New Relic sales representative. An Insights Pro trial will give you up to 35 days of custom event data retention for the duration of your trial.

Bundled Insights retention and overages

Based on your subscription, your New Relic products may report events to Insights as part of that subscription.

For customers not on a paid Insights account, New Relic may throttle or downsample Insights events to a limit of not more than than 4,000 events per host per minute.

Insights data retention provided as part of another subscription is limited to 8 days. This is in addition to your paid Insights subscription. Because of this, you may see an overage in the Insights Manage Data page. If the overage falls within the limits of this additional window, New Relic does not consider this an overage.

Insights overage example:

In this example, you are licensed for 800 million events over 4 weeks, a rate of 200 million events per week. You have APM Pro, Browser Pro, and Mobile Enterprise.

A fifth week of data is added via your subscriptions, bumping you to a total of 1 billion events stored within your plan: